IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/jmoncb/v44y2012i4p551-572.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Strategic Complementarity, Stabilization Policy, and the Optimal Degree of Publicity

Author

Listed:
  • JONATHAN G. JAMES
  • PHILLIP LAWLER

Abstract

This paper examines the welfare implications of public information dissemination within a model in which information is heterogeneous across agents and where a strategic complementarity is present. The focus of the analysis is on how the presence of stabilization policy affects the case for transparency. In considering this issue, it extends James and Lawler's (2011) contribution by incorporating an alternative payoff function and by employing a different representation of public disclosure. The study's key finding is that the conclusions drawn in its precursor are robust to these modifications; specifically, in the presence of optimally designed policy intervention zero transparency maximizes welfare.

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan G. James & Phillip Lawler, 2012. "Strategic Complementarity, Stabilization Policy, and the Optimal Degree of Publicity," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 44(4), pages 551-572, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:jmoncb:v:44:y:2012:i:4:p:551-572
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1538-4616.2012.00501.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-4616.2012.00501.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1538-4616.2012.00501.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alan S. Blinder & Michael Ehrmann & Marcel Fratzscher & Jakob De Haan & David-Jan Jansen, 2008. "Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(4), pages 910-945, December.
    2. George-Marios Angeletos & Alessandro Pavan, 2004. "Transparency of Information and Coordination in Economies with Investment Complementarities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(2), pages 91-98, May.
    3. Eijffinger, Sylvester C.W. & Geraats, Petra M., 2006. "How transparent are central banks?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 1-21, March.
    4. James, Jonathan G. & Lawler, Phillip, 2008. "Aggregate demand shocks, private signals and employment variability: Can better information be harmful?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 100(1), pages 101-104, July.
    5. repec:adr:anecst:y:2011:i:103-104:p:09 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Russell Cooper & Andrew John, 1988. "Coordinating Coordination Failures in Keynesian Models," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 103(3), pages 441-463.
    7. George-Marios Angeletos & Alessandro Pavan, 2007. "Efficient Use of Information and Social Value of Information," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(4), pages 1103-1142, July.
    8. Stephen Morris & Hyun Song Shin & Hui Tong, 2006. "Social Value of Public Information: Morris and Shin (2002) Is Actually Pro-Transparency, Not Con: Reply," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 453-455, March.
    9. Carl E. Walsh, 2007. "Optimal Economic Transparency," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 3(1), pages 5-36, March.
    10. Jonathan G. James & Phillip Lawler, 2011. "Optimal Policy Intervention and the Social Value of Public Information," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1561-1574, June.
    11. Baeriswyl, Romain & Cornand, Camille, 2010. "The signaling role of policy actions," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(6), pages 682-695, September.
    12. Lars E. O. Svensson, 2006. "Social Value of Public Information: Comment: Morris and Shin (2002) Is Actually Pro-Transparency, Not Con," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 448-452, March.
    13. Alan S. Blinder & Michael Ehrmann & Marcel Fratzscher & Jakob De Haan & David-Jan Jansen, 2008. "Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(4), pages 910-945, December.
    14. Romain Baeriswyl & Camille Cornand, 2011. "Transparency and Monetary Policy Effectiveness," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 103-104, pages 175-194.
    15. repec:pri:cepsud:161blinder is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Alex Cukierman, 2009. "The Limits of Transparency," Economic Notes, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, vol. 38(1‐2), pages 1-37, February.
    17. Stephen Morris & Hyun Song Shin, 2007. "Optimal Communication," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 5(2-3), pages 594-602, 04-05.
    18. Mr. Mauro F Roca, 2010. "Transparency and Monetary Policy with Imperfect Common Knowledge," IMF Working Papers 2010/091, International Monetary Fund.
    19. Woodford Michael, 2002. "Inflation Stabilization and Welfare," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 2(1), pages 1-53, February.
    20. Petra M. Geraats, 2002. "Central Bank Transparency," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(483), pages 532-565, November.
    21. Stephen Morris & Hyun Song Shin, 2002. "Social Value of Public Information," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1521-1534, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Camille Cornand & Frank Heinemann, 2015. "Limited higher order beliefs and the welfare effects of public information," Journal of Economic Studies, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 42(6), pages 1005-1028, November.
    2. Arato, Hiroki & Hori, Takeo & Nakamura, Tomoya, 2021. "Endogenous information acquisition and the partial announcement policy," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C).
    3. Emna Trabelsi, 2024. "Welfare fragmented information effects: The cost-benefit analysis and Trade-offs," Journal of Information Economics, Anser Press, vol. 2(1), pages 1-32, March.
    4. Jonathan G. James & Phillip Lawler, 2015. "Heterogeneous private sector information, central bank disclosure, and stabilization policy," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 82(2), pages 620-634, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jonathan G. James & Phillip Lawler, 2015. "Heterogeneous private sector information, central bank disclosure, and stabilization policy," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 82(2), pages 620-634, October.
    2. James, Jonathan G. & Lawler, Phillip, 2012. "Heterogeneous information quality; strategic complementarities and optimal policy design," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(3), pages 342-352.
    3. Meixing Dai & Moïse Sidiropoulos, 2017. "How multiplicative uncertainty affects the tradeoff between information disclosure and stabilisation policy?," Working Papers of BETA 2017-15, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    4. Jonathan G James & Phillip Lawler, 2017. "Optimal Transparency and Policy Intervention with Heterogeneous Signals and Information Stickiness," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 85(5), pages 577-600, September.
    5. Hahn, Volker, 2014. "Transparency In Monetary Policy, Signaling, And Heterogeneous Information," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 18(2), pages 369-394, March.
    6. Kohlhas, Alexandre N., 2020. "An informational rationale for action over disclosure," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 187(C).
    7. Cheick Kader M'Baye, 2012. "Inflation Targeting under Heterogeneous Information and Sticky Prices," Working Papers halshs-00677671, HAL.
    8. Shambaugh, George E. & Shen, Elaine B., 2018. "A clear advantage: The benefits of transparency to crisis recovery," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 391-416.
    9. van der Cruijsen, C.A.B., 2008. "The economic impact of central bank transparency," Other publications TiSEM 86c1ba91-1952-45b4-adac-8, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    10. Romain Baeriswyl & Camille Cornand & Bruno Ziliotto, 2020. "Observing and Shaping the Market: The Dilemma of Central Banks," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 52(8), pages 1973-2005, December.
    11. Williams, Andrew, 2015. "A global index of information transparency and accountability," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 804-824.
    12. Hwang, In Do & Lustenberger, Thomas & Rossi, Enzo, 2021. "Does communication influence executives’ opinion of central bank policy?☆," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    13. Ma, Yong & Li, Shushu, 2015. "Bayesian estimation of China's monetary policy transparency: A New Keynesian approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 236-248.
    14. Roman Horvath, 2020. "Peer Effects in Central Banking," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 68(4), pages 764-814, December.
    15. Cheick Kader M'baye, 2012. "Inflation Targeting under Heterogeneous Information and Sticky Prices," Working Papers 1202, Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon St-Étienne (GATE Lyon St-Étienne), Université de Lyon.
    16. Luigi Iovino & Jennifer La'O & George-Marios Angeletos, 2015. "The Social Value of Information in a Business-Cycle Model," 2015 Meeting Papers 1299, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Trabelsi, Emna & Hichri, Walid, 2021. "Central Bank Transparency with (semi-)public Information: Laboratory Experiments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    18. Thomas Lustenberger & Enzo Rossi, 2022. "The Social Value of Information: A Test of a Beauty and Nonbeauty Contest," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 54(7), pages 2125-2148, October.
    19. Colombo, Luca & Femminis, Gianluca, 2014. "Optimal policy intervention, constrained obfuscation and the social value of public information," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 224-226.
    20. Angeletos, G.-M. & Lian, C., 2016. "Incomplete Information in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1065-1240, Elsevier.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:jmoncb:v:44:y:2012:i:4:p:551-572. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-2879 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.